Claiborne County was created in 1802, and in 1803 Port Gibson, situated beside the Natchez Trace, became the county seat and was platted in 1811. Bayou Pierre gave the town access to the Mississippi River. During the economic expansion of the 1850s, the Port Gibson-Grand Gulf Railroad connected the town to the river, and in 1860, Windsor (ND79), the county’s grandest plantation house, was completed. In 1863, the battles of Grand Gulf and Port Gibson set the stage for the Siege of Vicksburg, but Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army moved through quickly and with little damage.
The completion of the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad in 1883 (1882, depot; 1202 Market Street) sparked the opening in 1882 of the Port Gibson Oil Works (Anthony and Vandeventer streets), which was among the nation’s oldest cottonseed oil mills when it closed in 2002 (mostly demolished in 2012). From 1907, the boll weevil infestation caused the cotton economy to decline, and the Great Depression extended the hard times. In 1939, the Port Gibson Historical Society, following the lead of Natchez, initiated a pilgrimage tour focused on Church Street’s historic buildings and mature live oak trees, banking on the legend that General Grant declared the town “too pretty to burn.” Ed Polk Douglas’s Architecture in Claiborne County, Mississippi (1974) and the listing of the Market Street-Suburb St. Mary Historic District (1979) in the National Register of Historic Places were important preservation initiatives. Douglas’s publication was funded by the nearby Grand Gulf Nuclear Generating Station, the state’s only nuclear power plant. Preservationists won the “Second Battle of Port Gibson” in 2011 when the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) announced plans to build a bypass rather than widen historic Church Street (U.S. 61).
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